FIR

FIR stands for Full Intra Request. It is one of the error resiliency mechanisms in WebRTC.

A receiving end can send a FIR message to the sender to indicate that it needs to refresh its received video.

Video is usually sent not as a compressed set of frames, but rather a compressed set of delta frames, which rely on previous frames to be decoded and displayed. If some of the packets get lost along the way, then it becomes somewhere between hard to impossible to continue decoding the stream without some remedy.

Sending out a FIR message indicates the sender to "reset" his encoder and start with a fresh keyframe.

A slighlty "lighter" request of the same kind is PLI (Picture Loss Indication).

Additional reading

Tsahi Levent-Levi

Tsahi Levent-Levi

Independent WebRTC analyst. 20+ years in telecom, 13 focused on WebRTC. Writes for developers and product teams who need to understand, not just implement, real-time communications.